Rutherford Birchard Hayes was the 19th president of the United States from 1877 to 1881, after serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. A lawyer and staunch abolitionist, he had defended refugee slaves in court proceedings during the antebellum years.

Although a number of previous presidents were lawyers, Hayes was the first to actually graduate law school, earning a degree from Harvard Law School in 1845.

Hayes was wounded five times, most seriously at the Battle of South Mountain in 1862. Encountering Confederates at Fox's Gap, he led a charge against their entrenched position and was shot through his left arm, fracturing the bone. He had one of his men tie a handkerchief above the wound in an effort to stop the bleeding and continued to lead his men in the battle.

Two future presidents fought at Fox's Gap during the Battle of South Mountain. Hayes served as commander of the 23rd Ohio Infantry, while William McKinley was a commissary sergeant. They would be elected to the presidency twenty years apart--Hayes in 1876, and McKinley in 1896.

After leaving congress, Hayes was elected to two consecutive terms as governor of Ohio, from 1868 to 1872. He later served a third two-year term, from 1876 to 1877.

After the war, he served in Congress from 1865 to 1867 as a Republican, and the Republican Party nominated Hayes as its candidate for the presidency in 1876.

In 1876, Hayes lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, but won an intensely disputed electoral-college vote after a Congressional commission awarded him 20 contested electoral votes. In the Compromise of 1877, Democrats acquiesced to Hayes' election on the condition that he withdraw remaining U.S. troops protecting Republican officeholders in the South, thus officially ending the Reconstruction era.

Hayes attempted to soothe the passions of the past few months, saying that "he serves his party best who serves his country best". He pledged to support "wise, honest, and peaceful local self-government" in the South. Despite his message of conciliation, however, many Democrats considered Hayes's election illegitimate and referred to him as "Rutherfraud" or "His Fraudulency" for the next four years.

In his first year in office, Hayes was faced with the United States' largest labor uprising to date, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. He resolved to send in troops to protect federal property wherever it appeared to be threatened, marking the first use of federal troops to break a strike against a private company.

Lucy Webb Hayes was unusually well educated for a young lady of her day, earning a degree in liberal arts from Cincinnati Wesleyan Female College in 1850 at the age of 18. She wrote essays on social and religious issues, including one in which she says, "It is acknowledged by most persons that her (woman's) mind is as strong as a man's.... Instead of being considered the slave of man, she is considered his equal in all things, and his superior in some."